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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.4 (2000) 829-830



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Book Review

L'Égypte, une aventure savante avec Bonaparte, Kléber, Menou, 1798-1801


Yves Laissus. L'Égypte, une aventure savante avec Bonaparte, Kléber, Menou, 1798-1801. Paris: Fayard, 1998. 614 pp. Ill. F 170.00 (paperbound).

Historians of medicine always welcome accounts of encounters between non-Western peoples and Europeans that provide insights into the differing ways in which the two groups understood specific diseases and disease environments. Interested readers will find a few tantalizing bits of information about these subjects in the book under review. In thirteen chapters, Yves Laissus discusses the reasons why Napoleon Bonaparte decided to have a group of young scholars (savants) accompany the French army that conquered Egypt in 1798, and then traces in considerable detail their efforts to establish the Institute of Egypt in Cairo. Laissus is the former director of the French National Museum of Natural History, and he organized the 1998 exhibition at the museum that celebrated the 200th anniversary of the French conquest.

In a celebratory volume of this sort one can perhaps expect that the author will not demonstrate great awareness of the insights to be gained from the modern disciplines of history, historical anthropology, or comparative literature. In this one is not disappointed. Oblivious to the blinding prejudices of the ancien régime orientalist Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf de Volney (1757-1820) whose Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie was published in 1787, Laissus quotes his opinions on Egypt and the Egyptians ("ignorant," "superstitious," "fanatical") on [End Page 829] twenty-eight occasions, often at great length. If reliance on Volney as a source of information were in any way justified, it would only be because it is known that Napoleon's own attitude toward Egypt was deeply influenced by his reading of Voyage en Égypte. But now that two hundred years have passed since the French descended on Egypt with their "civilizing" and colonizing mission, the only interesting thing about Volney's Voyage is what it tells us about the mind-set of a sector of the French elite at the end of the eighteenth century; it tells us nothing about Egypt.

In four brief pages (pp. 159-62) Laissus tells us about the health reforms that the French attempted to impose on Egypt; the account is inconsequential. However, the book as a whole does serve as a useful introduction to the attitudes expressed in the much longer sections on health and disease in the Description de l'Égypte: État moderne II:2, written in 1799 by the "engineer-geographer" Edme-François Jomard and the engineer Gibert-Joseph Chabrol. Jomard admitted that bubonic plague tended to sweep through Egypt every five or six years, and that dysentery and smallpox caused a high rate of mortality among infants and young children. However, in the process of making his building-by-building survey of Cairo, he discovered that many Egyptian males lived well into their nineties and beyond. He credited this to "the extreme sobriety of the Egyptians, the regularity of their way of life, the moderation that is characteristic of most of them . . . as well as the nature of their food, the air, and the waters of this country, which can be regarded as very healthy." 1

Chabrol, on the other hand, was burdened with the extreme Orientalist prejudices current at the time in the French medical profession. For example, he held that the virus of what he understood to be syphilis "transmits itself from generation to generation and infects the entire population. It passes into the blood of the infant with the milk of his wet nurse, and later, if smallpox attacks this enfeebled being, already corrupted in the very sources of life, one can easily see why it is so difficult to resist its violence." 2

Today the published writings of the savants who came to Egypt in 1798 are not usually seen as reliable information, but rather as fascinating artifacts surviving from a...

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